Hagy’s images of Wyoming are a bit too muted to be fully engaging, but her writing is consistently provocative and informed.
An assortment of carefully tuned stories marked by hauntings, curious incidents and hard Western landscapes.
As the title suggests, few strange spirits appear in the fourth collection of short fiction by Hagy (Keeneland, 2000, etc.). But she’s less interested in conjuring scares than in studying how fear and the feelings of isolation unique to Wyoming affect the lives of her characters. “The Sin Eaters,” the book’s longest and final story, follows a preacher arriving from Iowa in 1889 to serve as a missionary for the Shoshone Indians; his travels are marked by a few lessons in area folklore (like the titular sin eaters, spirits that cleanse the bodies of the newly dead) and a glimpse of the violence that suggests that white homesteaders need his attention more than the natives. Most of the stories, though, are set in present-day Wyoming, and Hagy has a knack for conveying the ominous emptiness of the state as well as showing how small twists of fate spin into larger dramas. “How Bitter the Weather” is narrated by a young newspaper reporter trying to locate a missing local man of Romani descent, and her efforts open up conversations about Gypsy superstitions and her own romantic conflicts. “Border” follows a man hoping to make a quick buck stealing a prize border collie, an experience that reveals others’ cruelty and his own gullibility. Hagy’s prose is generally measured and restrained, bordering on grim, but she’s not without a sense of humor: In “Superstitions of the Indians” she pits a snarky graduate student against the ghost of a woman who haunts the library where he works, and the story functions as both a light satire of academia and a lament for the Native-American culture moldering in the stacks. The author is on shakier ground when she experiments with structure, as in “Brief Lives of the Trainmen,” a series of snapshots of railroad workers in the 1860s, but the more successful “Oil & Gas” shows how encroaching corporate interests reshape residents’ lives.
Hagy’s images of Wyoming are a bit too muted to be fully engaging, but her writing is consistently provocative and informed.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-55597-548-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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